Heroic Five Mans in Cata.........Spot on

For me, the heroic five mans in cata patches firelands and hour of twilight were the perfect gear progression for casual players and a great lead up to a slightly more challenging LFR raid than by todays standards.

The Zul'Gurub and A'man were a nice challenge at the time and I thought the hour of twilight five mans were an absolute master piece!

I can't but my finger on it but they were just amazing, I know that blizz has said they don't want ppl endlessly running five mans to progress whether it be for rep or whatever.

But when and who said they didn't like doing that? I certainly don't count myself amongst the unhappy bunch who inspired scenerios (can't stand them btw).

I also know that blizzard say that Dungeons take alot of work, but you know when it comes down to dungeons vs scenerios, I would sooner have less dungeons thanks. Much higher quality experience.

So I have been disappointed patch after patch with MoP from a dungeon perspective (I actually think the ToT content is great minus the mandatory scenerios).

So I am hoping for some to appear just like the epic dropping, lore rich, challenging experiences we had back in cata.

The word "Heroic" hasn't really applied since TBC. These days heroic dungeons are just for getting valor capped or to gear up in the first week of having a character. There's zero challenge, and practically zero meaningful rewards to be found in them.

I'd prefer the TBC model of 2-3 hours of hard work and ACTUAL thought requirement to get a pretty nice reward in the form of the best loot you could get outside of raiding as well as cost-effective badges of justice (justice points, which in the current game are utterly worthless, so why even have them?)

If you don't want to commit the time and energy needed to do HEROIC dungeons, which should actually be somewhat heroic in my opinion, you can stick to normal mode dungeons (which should be as hard as current heroics) and scenarios and LFR.

this is a significant problem with the currrent game in my opinion.

tl;dr : make HEROIC dungeons difficult, requiring thought and time, AND (this is also important) provide adequate reward for taking the time and energy to do these dungeons.

If you want to talk to me about wow theorycrafting or anything really:Eranthe#1639

The word "Heroic" hasn't really applied since TBC. These days heroic dungeons are just for getting valor capped or to gear up in the first week of having a character. There's zero challenge, and practically zero meaningful rewards to be found in them.

I'd prefer the TBC model of 2-3 hours of hard work and ACTUAL thought requirement to get a pretty nice reward in the form of the best loot you could get outside of raiding as well as cost-effective badges of justice (justice points, which in the current game are utterly worthless, so why even have them?)

If you don't want to commit the time and energy needed to do HEROIC dungeons, which should actually be somewhat heroic in my opinion, you can stick to normal mode dungeons (which should be as hard as current heroics) and scenarios and LFR.

this is a significant problem with the currrent game in my opinion.

tl;dr : make HEROIC dungeons difficult, requiring thought and time, AND (this is also important) provide adequate reward for taking the time and energy to do these dungeons.

Well, it was more 1 - 2 hours per heroic in TBC, 2 - 3 hours was even in those days a rather bad group.
The Badges of Justice I wouldn't compare with Justice Points nowadays anymore. They were a lot more like today's Valor Points. All items have been very good competitive Epics, which been on par with the gear from the raids.

Ad far as making heroics more difficult again. We've been there, at the beginning of Cataclysm, and the model failed brutally.
If you want it more rewarding and challenging again, do heroic scenarios. They may be a lot shorter, but they sure have a nice reward and are not really total faceroll.

"The pen is mightier than the sword.. and considerably easier to write with."

I'd much prefer if they had the same difficulty 5 mans for gearing up as they do now, only have no daily lockout. No one thinks 463 gear is going to break the bank anymore as far as progression is concerned.

I'd like it if they added a tier of heroics that are tbc/cata difficulty that provide better rewards, cannot be queued for unless as a group of 5, and have a daily lockout to prevent spamming. These would provide the equivalent of MSV lfr gear with the end bosses dropping HoF/ToES equivalent gear. If you want to gear up from these, you will be sweating and crying over their difficulty (at least when they are released with their tier)

The production line feel of wow has severely hurt the game in my opinion. Heroic scenarios are a step in the right direction of queued for as a group content. I'd very much like if they brought back group forming in wow, but left in the faceroll queue, afk and leave content too.

Well, it was more 1 - 2 hours per heroic in TBC, 2 - 3 hours was even in those days a rather bad group.
The Badges of Justice I wouldn't compare with Justice Points nowadays anymore. They were a lot more like today's Valor Points. All items have been very good competitive Epics, which been on par with the gear from the raids.

Ad far as making heroics more difficult again. We've been there, at the beginning of Cataclysm, and the model failed brutally.
If you want it more rewarding and challenging again, do heroic scenarios. They may be a lot shorter, but they sure have a nice reward and are not really total faceroll.

The model failed because players were too used to afking/tunnel visioning their way through "heroics" in wrath and when they actually needed to play well they hated it. Solution: nerf everything to make it easy for the complainers.

I would have preferred increasing the rewards for normals and heroics and letting normals fill the role that wrath's heroics filled, leaving heroics for the players that want to commit time and energy to get a more time-efficient reward.

Heroic scenarios are really more of a gear check than a skill/thought check. The day they came out I queued for one and aoe'd down everything and powered through mechanics with dps. I think I did die once, but I have no idea why or how, and that's a testament to what it takes to clear them.

I understand not everyone will agree, particularly people who have only ever experienced the current model that is heroics, but ask yourself this. When you queue for a heroic with your friends or by yourself, do you have fun doing it? Do you want to have fun doing it? What can be done to make heroics fun?

I think challenge and reward are what need to be balanced to accomplish it.

If you want to talk to me about wow theorycrafting or anything really:Eranthe#1639

I know we have challenge modes, but i wish we had harcore dungeon mode. Which is basically dungeons like early cata and bc long and hard. They would reward gear about at lfr level. I kind of feel like challenge modes and hard core dungeons could coexist. You couldnt queue for them btw.

Challenge modes are for a few things: time effective valor, transmog gear, vanity items, prestige. A lot of people feel like once you have the vanity items, you're done with them. There aren't a ton of people that just want to get good times in them, probably because it requires gathering people up, farming consumables and dealing with instant reset mechanics for little to no tangible reward.

So increase the rewards and you'll see more and more people doing challenge modes, not simply for good times (pun intended), but just for the sake of clearing them to get the rewards.

If you want to talk to me about wow theorycrafting or anything really:Eranthe#1639

Challenge modes are for a few things: time effective valor, transmog gear, vanity items, prestige. A lot of people feel like once you have the vanity items, you're done with them. There aren't a ton of people that just want to get good times in them, probably because it requires gathering people up, farming consumables and dealing with instant reset mechanics for little to no tangible reward.

So increase the rewards and you'll see more and more people doing challenge modes, not simply for good times (pun intended), but just for the sake of clearing them to get the rewards.

I found the difficulty of the cata launch heroics and the troll heroics to be rather unpleasant. Not because the difficulty of the content was too high, but the ability to find a group (even with LFD) who could do it, took way too long. Even as people geared up and the content became trivial it was still more than a lot of the people that queued into my group, making the experience less fun than it should be.

I do agree that the HoT heroics were well balanced in terms of difficulty. They were easy enough that almost anyone could complete them, but not so trivial that I fell asleep while I was healing through them.

I have done very very few heroics in MoP, its almost as if you can skip them altogether and just hop into LFR. Though I do wish we had seen a sense of progression through heroic dungeons in this expansion. Given my limited time availability in game, I really like the idea of actual gear progression through dungeon content. Unfortunately Blizzard doesn't agree with me.

And that really illustrates my biggest frustration with Blizzard: They ask for my feedback but tell me what I want and walk away before I can ever open my mouth. I can imagine its difficult to listen to so many opinions and try to address them all, but I have a feeling Blizzard doesn't work that way. They seem to randomly pick an idea out of player feedback and implement it while crossing their fingers, hoping that it will work. When it would be easier to simply look at all the feedback and do the best you can to find middle ground. Not that I'm being overly negative, they do implement a lot of great things, I just think the way player feedback is handled could be improved upon some.

These aren't the same thing at all. They are fun, and have a place but they are not like hard heroics. Hard heroics you can strategize, take breaks if you get frustrated, plan pulls. It's not a game of perfect execution, wipes don't ruin the run in hard heroics like they do in challenge modes. You can't eventually outgear challenge modes and go back in, saying, "man, remember when this was hard, look how much stronger we are."

I think both have a place, I want harder heroics. I never experienced BC heroics, but I LOVED Cata's heroics during the first few weeks.

In other news, original Cata heroics actually were where they should have been difficulty wise. In retrospect, it was about 2 weeks of hell until folks decided that they needed to actually learn how to play thier class, realize that healer mana wasn't an infinite resource, and that skull actually precedes X. Some of the dungeons were harder than others, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Not everything was perfect however. Queue times for the original dungeons were abysmal, and magnified simply because one wipe would mean that a Wrath coddled tank or healer would likely leave. Chaos orbs, and their availability were an absolute trainwreck of game design right off the bat, and was as much of a hurdle to the advancement of your average player as anything else. Troll heroics were the only 'worthwhile' dungeons for way way too long, and the final handful of DS ones were a pushover, despite being rather fun from a lore perspective.

---------- Post added 2013-06-18 at 01:01 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Sabrage

2 words:

Challenge modes

A side game, as relevant to gear progression as pet battles.

Less, in fact.

Benevolence is a luxury for the strong - Wrathion
Plox. I got your plox right fucking here. - Animalhouse
I still prefer seeing Thrall rather than blood in my urine, that doesnt make him a good character. - Verdugo

But they werent hard, I cant even remember the last time a HC was actually hard. BC HC's held true to their name.

Hard is relative. Cata's heroics are the hardest since I started in Wrath. They were capable of wiping you, and a few of them were able to consistently kill groups for a while. I don't think I ever wiped in a MoP heroic. They are silly easy, very much like Wrath's were.

I never used CC in a MoP heroic.

Now, I'm a tank of an active guild, so I didn't have to pug during the first few weeks of either Cata or MoP. I imagine that lfd groups had a harder time in Cata, and this is, in fact, the impetus Blizz gave us for making easier heroics.

I think the release 5mans of Cata were pretty great. On the first days after leveling, when the expansion just released, there was plenty of wiping with everyone having low gear and no experience.

Hour of Twilight etc were also good, but Blizzard has already admitted they took design time away from the raid, resulting in a relatively poor raid (DS). I think most will agree the tiers since then as well as Firelands were a lot better raid-wise, and it's better to have a good raid than good new 5mans.

Hard is relative. Cata's heroics are the hardest since I started in Wrath. They were capable of wiping you, and a few of them were able to consistently kill groups for a while. I don't think I ever wiped in a MoP heroic. They are silly easy, very much like Wrath's were.

I never used CC in a MoP heroic.

Now, I'm a tank of an active guild, so I didn't have to pug during the first few weeks of either Cata or MoP. I imagine that lfd groups had a harder time in Cata, and this is, in fact, the impetus Blizz gave us for making easier heroics.

I actually have seen a wipe or 2 in an MoP heroic, if you have enough people that have no idea what to do on an encounter, it can happen... but it's admittedly extremely rare. And the 'oops, you're screwing this up' window is way way larger than it was even in Wrath heroics (which were also harder than MoP ones, appropriate gear levels taken into consideration)

Benevolence is a luxury for the strong - Wrathion
Plox. I got your plox right fucking here. - Animalhouse
I still prefer seeing Thrall rather than blood in my urine, that doesnt make him a good character. - Verdugo

The word "Heroic" hasn't really applied since TBC. These days heroic dungeons are just for getting valor capped or to gear up in the first week of having a character. There's zero challenge, and practically zero meaningful rewards to be found in them.

I'd prefer the TBC model of 2-3 hours of hard work and ACTUAL thought requirement to get a pretty nice reward in the form of the best loot you could get outside of raiding as well as cost-effective badges of justice (justice points, which in the current game are utterly worthless, so why even have them?)

If you don't want to commit the time and energy needed to do HEROIC dungeons, which should actually be somewhat heroic in my opinion, you can stick to normal mode dungeons (which should be as hard as current heroics) and scenarios and LFR.

this is a significant problem with the currrent game in my opinion.

tl;dr : make HEROIC dungeons difficult, requiring thought and time, AND (this is also important) provide adequate reward for taking the time and energy to do these dungeons.

The thing is that heroic dungeons have never fit that description. If you'd like I can probably link you to one of my TBC characters to show that I've done them all before WLK launched. The only ones that were somewhat difficult were the ones that nobody ever did, and nobody ever talks about. The only one that I personally had any difficulty with was Heroic Blood Furnace, because lulzrngstuns are fun. There were a handful of good pieces in the heroics, but most people just ran them for badges, and it was far more efficient to just run the easy ones every day for badges than to spend an hour + in the longer ones. Even MgT, which people struggled with for the first couple weeks wasn't really hard, it was just different from the others and required players to adjust their strategy. I played a protection warrior in BC, so I was at a disadvantage for tanking Shattered Halls and MgT, and I still didn't find them to be terribly difficult. In fact I was quite disappointed when I did my first heroics as I was expecting something that was on par with 5-man Scholo/Strath back in the day when everyone did them in groups of 10~ That, to me, was "heroic."

Cata heroics were the closest we've had since to BC heroics. Pandaria heroics are ... not even really worth talking about. They're insanely easy. Three weeks into the expansion people in my guild were soloing bosses in there without much difficulty. Even the new heroic scenarios are really really easy, I soloed the last boss of heroic Dark Heart of Pandaria on my prot warrior. It took forever and a day, but it was fun at least.

If they ever reintroduce heroic 5-mans that take more than 10 minutes and you can't AFK through I'd be happy to run them with guilides, but in LFD it just leads to frustration.